The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

[CHAPTER XXII]
LETTING IN THE POPULATION[3]

[3] This chapter follows, in part, F. L. Paxson, "The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol. I, pp. 105–118.

"Veil them, cover them, wall them round—
Blossom, and creeper, and weed—
Let us forget the sight and the sound,
The smell and the touch of the breed!"

Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle," upon the Indian village. The forces of nature were turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled at the growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and the wild pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the thatched huts dissolved in the torrents, and "by the end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before." The white man worked the opposite of this on what remained of the American desert in the last fifteen years of the history of the old frontier. In a decade and a half a greater change came over it than the previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890, it is fair to say that the frontier was no more.

The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary line separating the farm lands and the unused West, had become nearly a circle before the compromise of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the last generation. The flanks had widened out in the thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri, and Iowa had received their population. In the next ten years Texas and the Pacific settlements had carried the line further west until the circular shape of the frontier was clearly apparent by the middle of the century. And thus it stood, with changes only in detail, for a generation more. In whatever sense the word "frontier" is used, the fact is the same. If it be taken as the dividing line, as the area enclosed, or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the frontier of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier of 1850.

The pressure on the frontier line had increased steadily during these thirty years. Population moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War. The agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in size and wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that became clearer as more citizens settled along it. East and south, it was close to the rainfall line which divides easy farming country from the semi-arid plains; west, it was a mountain range. In either case the country enclosed was too refractory to yield to the piecemeal process which had conquered the wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to expansion and hindrance to communication became of increasing consequence as population grew.

Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural frontier was pressing against it. By 1860 the railway frontier had reached it. The former could not cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture offered by the lands beyond; the latter was restrained by the prohibitive cost of building railways through an entirely unsettled district. Private initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the continent; the one remaining task called for direct national aid.

The influences operating upon this frontier of the Far West, though not making it less of a barrier, made it better known than any of the earlier frontiers. In the first place, the trails crossed it, with the result that its geography became well known throughout the country. No other frontier had been the site of a thoroughfare for many years before its actual settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge of the West, and scattered groups of inhabitants here and there, without populating it in any sense. Finally the Indian friction produced the series of Indian wars which again called the wild West to the centre of the stage for many years.

All of these forces served to advertise the existence of this frontier and its barrier character. They had coöperated to enlarge the railway movement, as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union Pacific was authorized to meet the new demand; and while the Union Pacific was under construction, other roads to meet the same demands were chartered and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled the final barrier.

Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation of the entire frontier between 1862 and 1871. The charter acts of the Northern Pacific, the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern Pacific at once opened the way for some five new continental lines and closed the period of direct federal aid to railway construction. The Northern Pacific received its charter on the same day that the Union Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864. It was authorized to join the waters of Lake Superior and Puget Sound, and was to receive a land grant of twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in the territories through which it should run. In the summer of 1866 a third continental route was provided for in the South along the line of the thirty-fifth parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific, was to build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Pacific, and to connect, near the eastern line of California, with the Southern Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the territories. The Texas Pacific was chartered March 3, 1871, as the last of the land grant railways. It received the usual grant, which was applicable only west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana and El Paso, it could receive no federal aid since in Texas there were no public lands. Its charter called for construction to San Diego, but the Southern Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico, headed it off at El Paso, and it got no farther.